Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Last night I watched one of the PBS pledge-break specials
that proved to be unexpectedly interesting: The Highwaymen, a 1990 filmed concert from the Nassau Coliseum on
Long Island featuring what the local KPBS hucksters endlessly referred to as
“the first country-music supergroup.” In alphabetical order, they were Johnny
Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson (whose reputation was really closer
to folk and rock than country, but we’ll let that pass — he fit in just fine)
and Willie Nelson. The local hucksters went on and on and on about how you could never assemble a group like this
again, which in one sense was true — Cash and Jennings are both dead — though
one could probably either reunite Kristofferson and Nelson with two other
people of similar stature (well, maybe not the stature of Cash and Jennings,
but pretty damned close — I would think Garth Brooks would be a no-brainer for
inclusion in a modern-day Highwaymen 2 and probably either Brad Paisley or
Blake Shelton for slot four) or pick four all-stars of modern-day country for a
totally fresh version. Be that as it may, the original Highwaymen were
certainly a phenomenon; like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope with the Road movies, they maintained their individual careers but
also united for the Highwaymen projects, producing three albums: Highwayman (note the singular title; as their Wikipedia page
explains, “Formed in 1985, the group did not have an official name when they
released their first album on Columbia
Records. The album, entitled Highwayman, was credited to ‘Nelson, Jennings, Cash,
Kristofferson.’ The single ‘Highwayman,’ a Jimmy Webb cover, became a
#1 country hit” — sort of like the Three Tenors, whose debut album in 1990 was
simply called Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti in Concert while their second one, in 1994, featured “The 3
Tenors,” with an elaborate animation of a giant numeral “3,” on the credits of
their video as well as the cover of their CD) in 1985, Highwaymen 2 in 1990 (this was the one they were promoting when
they gave the concert reproduced on PBS, and they performed the single from it,
“Silver Stallion”) and The Road Goes On Forever in 1995. Given the vagaries of record contracts, the
first two were on Columbia (of the four Highwaymen, all but Jennings were
Columbia artists at the time) and the last on Liberty, which by then had been
pretty much ghettoized as EMI’s country label.

The 1990 Long Island concert by
the Highwaymen is a nice souvenir of the time not only when Johnny Cash and
Waylon Jennings were still alive but Kris Kristofferson had a serviceable (or
more than that) voice — sometime in the next few years Kristofferson’s voice
shredded almost completely but here he’s still in excellent form — and Willie
Nelson singing in that remarkably intimate-sounding voice that made him
probably the most successful country artist to “cross over” to mainstream pop
since Cash. (Nelson’s pop breakthrough was with the 1975 album Red-Headed
Stranger — ironically, a vividly
uncompromising concept album about the life of an outlaw cowboy — which
launched him on a successful career on Columbia after he’d bombed out on
Liberty, RCA Victor and Atlantic, for whom he made Phases and Stages, his release just before Red-Headed
Stranger and a masterpiece that got lost in
the shuffle when Atlantic abruptly closed their country division just as it was
being released. Three years later Dolly Parton would abruptly break out of the
country ghetto with “Heartbreaker” and a series of pop singles whose only real
concessions to country were Parton’s reputation and the twang in her voice.)
The Highwaymen concerts — if this one is representative — were quite good
showcases both for the individual talents of the country superstars represented
and surprisingly effective blends. The show (at least the part of it we got to
see on TV — as usual in these pledge-break shows we were incessantly reminded
that what we were watching was only a portion of what was filmed and we’d have
to give a three-figure contribution to KPBS to get a DVD and/or a CD with the
whole thing) opened with the “Highwayman” single, with each of the four taking
turns singing lead — first Nelson, then Kristofferson, then Jennings and
finally Cash — and then became a duet between Jennings and Nelson on “Mama,
Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and a solo for Cash on his 1963
hit (actually written by his wife, June Carter Cash, with songwriter Merle
Kilgore) “Ring of Fire.” Cash did beautifully on this one even though I was a
bit (well, more than a bit, actually) disappointed that the famous mariachi trumpets on the original (June Carter recalled that
Cash woke her in the middle of the night after one of the recording sessions
and said he’d had a dream about having mariachi trumpets on the record, so he called in a mariachi band the next day and added them) were reproduced on
a synthesizer. Then they did a version of Kristofferson’s song “Me and Bobby
McGee,” which was definitively recorded by Janis Joplin for her last album, Pearl, in 1970 (supposedly she and Kristofferson had a
brief affair and she decided to record the song to help him, but by the time
her version was released his career was already launched and she was dead) and
was here performed by Kristofferson, Jennings and Cash, in that order, with
Nelson remaining silent vocally but contributing a lovely guitar solo.

After
that there was a pledge break, following which Cash tore into “Folsom Prison
Blues” (my friend Leo, who once actually taught a writing class in prison, was
especially impressed by the song and even more impressed when I told him that
in 1968, 13 years after the original record, Cash did a live album in Folsom Prison, highlighted the song and, instead of
just doing his regular concert set, cherry-picked his repertoire so all the
songs he played for the prisoners would be about subjects they could relate to:
prison and crime), following which Kristofferson came on for his other two star-making songs, “Sunday Morning Coming Down”
(the real launch of his career; supposedly he chartered a helicopter and landed
it on Johnny Cash’s front lawn to present him with the song and ask him to
record it, which Cash did; often in country music your career is jump-started
when you can get an established artist to record a song of yours, as Willie
Nelson did when he got Patsy Cline to record his “Crazy”), on which Cash joined
him on lead vocal midway through; and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Then
Willie Nelson soloed on “Always on My Mind” (one of his biggest hits but not
one of his better songs — ol’ Willie is great when he writes songs about
relationships on the rocks but not so good when he tries to write a
straightforward love song about a couple who are actually happy together),
following which he and Cash duetted on one of Cash’s earliest Columbia hits, “I
Still Miss Someone” (though I still like Cash’s original version and Joan Baez’s
cover better). Then they trotted out (no pun intended) “Silver Stallion,” the
“plug” song from Highwaymen 2,
and it was a quite beautiful and nostalgic country ballad even though Nelson
had written better ones for Red-Headed Stranger. Then they spotted a pledge break, and after it came
one of the most intriguing songs on the program, “Are You Sure Hank Done It
That Way?,” an engaging song about a struggling young country artist going
through the traumas of playing on the road and doing crappy gigs at which no
one in particular is listening to him, and plaintively asking his manager, “Are
you sure Hank Williams done it
that way?” (The Highwaymen, like many other country artists, cited Hank
Williams as virtually the patron saint of country music; the Highwaymen song
Columbia chose for inclusion on the Essential Johnny Cash compilation, regrettably not perfored here, was
called “The Night Hank Williams Came to Town.”) For this one Jennings didn’t
sing but did play the second
guitar solo — and he was surprisingly good.

Then Johnny Cash did one of his
trademark songs (and a key piece in his achieving crossover status, breaking
out of the country ghetto and becoming an American pop icon), “A Boy Named
Sue,” including an hilarious moment in which he used his voice to imitate the
“bleep” on the original single release. Then came what was in some ways the
best song of the show: “Why Me, Lord?,” a gospel song on which Kristofferson
sang lead and the rest joined in classic gospel-quartette fashion, proving once
again that virtually the entire American musical tradition — blues, ragtime,
jazz, rock, soul and country —
comes from African-American spirituals, hymns and gospel music. (I remember
seeing one special about Dolly Parton that proclaimed that she started singing
in church, and I yelled at the TV, “Of course she did! So did Elvis! It wasn’t just Black singers
who started in church!”) Then Jennings sang lead and the others sang backup on his big hit of the time, “Luckenbach, Texas” (the town
itself is described on Wikipedia as “an unincorporated community thirteen
miles [19 km] from Fredericksburg in
southeastern Gillespie
County, Texas, United States, part of
the Texas Hill
Country,” but probably nobody outside Texas had heard of it until
Jennings immortalized it in song) and Nelson, Cash and Jennings joined forces
for a searing version of Cash’s early Sun hit “Big River” (a song Cash wrote
after a TV Guide writer said,
“Johnny Cash has the big river blues in his voice”), following which there was
another pledge break and then the grand finale, Nelson leading the other three
in his song “On the Road Again” (another lesser entry in the Nelson canon but
one that became a big pop hit). The Highwaymen is a welcome documentation of a bygone era in
country music, when there was still a distinctive “country” sound apart from
the style that dominates country music (especially its male artists) today, the
kind of thing we called “Southern rock” when the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd
Skynyrd played it in the 1970’s — and when country artists had distinctive
styles and artistic profiles instead of blending into a sort of generic image
of tight jeans and big hats the way they do now. It was welcome to see this on
PBS even though the damnable begging they continually have to do gets in the
way of their self-proclaimed mission to preserve parts of American culture no
longer welcome on commercial TV.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Last night’s Lifetime “world premiere” TV-movie turned out
to be unexpectedly interesting even though it was pretty much another chip off
the old Lifetime log — Unwanted Guest, a
2016 production from MarVista Entertainment (I’m not sure whether the “v” in
the middle is supposed to be capitalized; I’ve seen it both ways and the name
on their actual logo is all
caps), co-produced, written and
directed by Fred Olen Ray, who apparently has enough of a “rep” he’s done
similar productions that have had at least some semblance of a theatrical
release. The film opens at a college campus in the L.A. area — we know it’s
L.A. because we see a Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic vehicle on the
scene — where just before break (which break is not made especially clear, though I think it was supposed to
be Christmas or the end of the year or whatever the current politically correct euphemism is) a
student trips down a flight of stairs to his death. Roommates Christine Roberts
(Valentina Novakovic) and Amy Thomas (Kate Mansi) are broken up about the
death, and when Amy complains to Christine that her parents are out of the
country and therefore she was planning to spend the break in their dorm room,
Christine impulsively, like many a stupid Lifetime heroine before her, invites
Amy to spend the break at her place with her mom Anna (Beth Littleford) and her
stepfather, Charles Benton (the surprisingly hot Ted King — when director Ray
showed him shirtless and flashing a pair of nice nipples I fell in lust with
him immediately and waited for a soft-core porn scene which, alas, never
materialized). Amy, who arrives at the Benton manse (a typical 1-percenters’ dwelling since Charles is a
sensationally successful copyright attorney — at one point in the proceedings
the plot comes to a dead stop so Charles and his staff can have a conference
about the horrors of digital copying and the need to pass laws holding Internet
service providers and Web site owners responsible for any “unauthorized”
material on their sites — no comment except that I think the advent of digital
copying has rendered traditional copyright unenforceable and useless, and the
basis of copyright law should acknowledge that it’s impossible to keep people
from copying material and shift to making sure they pay for reuse) as a mousy
little thing wearing glasses and with her hair tied back, quickly loosens up,
starts wearing contacts (of course Dorothy Parker’s famous lines, “Men seldom
make passes/At girls who wear glasses,” get quoted, though writer Ray garbles
them) and lets her hair flow freely, turning herself into a delectable piece of
young womanhood that sets her sights on seducing Charles. She sets her sights
on quite a few other things as well; on her first night at the Bentons’ Amy
steals a bottle of dad’s wine and shares it with Christine — only Christine’s
glass is drugged with a chemical tranquilizer that hasn’t been manufactured
since the 1950’s but is easily synthesized from readily available ingredients
if you know enough about chemistry, which Amy does because she was a pre-med
student and was one of the three students at her university who had a key to
the school’s chem lab.

Later, ostensibly helping Christine’s mom Anna cook for
a major dinner party Charles is throwing for three of his business associates —
plus his law partner Ken, an even more drop-dead gorgeous guy who immediately
takes a shine to Amy and starts hitting on her — in fact she kicks out the
step-stool on which Anna is standing to get a heavy Dutch oven and Anna falls
and breaks her legs in two places. By now we’ve long since realized that that
guy back on the campus didn’t just fall to his death accidentally — Amy tripped
him after drugging him with the same stuff she’d later use on Christine (and on
Anna, slipping it into her juice drinks), and we learn about it from the police
who are investigating the murder and trying to locate Amy. For a while during
this movie I was expecting and hoping that Fred Olen Ray would insert an
explanation for What Made Amy Run — but later on I liked that he didn’t; aside
from Amy going after Charles (either out of lust, gold-digging hope that she
could get a rich husband by displacing and disposing of the other women in his
life — his current wife and her daughter — or a mix of both) it’s not entirely
clear what she wants or why she’s
killing or severely injuring all these people to get it. Like Shakespeare’s
Iago, Amy becomes a more powerful villainess precisely because we’re not let in on the secrets of her motivations.
Ultimately, having rendered both Anna and Christine hors de combat, Amy finally does get Charles to have sex with her — though, darnit,
director Ray plays the old coy Production Code-era did-they-or-didn’t-they
routine on us and did not give us
the soft-core porn scene between Ted King and Kate Mansi I’d been expecting,
hoping for and even drooling over the prospect of, and it’s only at the end,
when Charles tells Amy he “made a mistake,” that it’s definitively nailed down
that they did have sex. Amy also
impersonates the other characters on the phone; she poses as Anna and cancels a
business lunch date Anna (a wanna-be realtor — or is that RealtorTM?
— who’s occasionally showing properties but hasn’t actually sold one in months)
had been counting on; she also poses as Christine and tells the police when
they call that Amy has already left; later, when Ken tells Charles in Amy’s
presence that he told the police
Amy was still staying at the Bentons’, Amy gets revenge by cutting the brake
lines of Ken’s car (a really cool
1960’s Corvette Sting Ray) so he loses control of it on a mountain road and
dies.

It all ends with Charles, clueless as to why Anna and Christine both keep
getting sicker but anxious to call in a professional live-in nurse rather than
trust Amy to take care of them, telling Amy that she’ll have to leave.
Unfortunately, he stupidly does this in his kitchen while Amy is holding a
kitchen knife, and while she doesn’t stab him with it she gets awfully close to
doing so until — surprise! —
Anna, despite having a leg broken in two places and being in excruciating pain
when Amy’s drug cocktails aren’t knocking her out, drags herself into the
kitchen, sneaks up behind Amy and injects her with a poison Amy had previously
prepared to knock off Anna and make it look like an accidental overdose of her
pain meds. Unwanted Guest is a
title so obscure it isn’t yet listed on imdb.com at all — I had to glean the
information from the above from other Web sites that ran pre-broadcast articles
on it — and yet it’s one of the better examples of the typical Lifetime psycho
thriller. The story is well constructed and makes sense, Amy is a powerfully
ambiguous character (as, indeed, are the other three principals) and the actors
rise to the challenges of Ray’s script and create multidimensional
characterizations. Ted King is especially good as the man who’s being given the
full-court press by a professional seductress — his close-ups eloquently reveal
his character’s conflict over lust vs. loyalty, and we “get” that his brain and
his dick are struggling for control of his consciousness — and Kate Mansi is
appropriate as the bad girl, playing with the right weird combination of
surface perkiness and deep evil. (It’s not her fault that a thousand other
young actresses have played this same part in one Lifetime movie after another,
and after a while they start to blend together.) The other two women have
little to do but play victims, though Valentina Novakovic is appropriate
towards the end as she realizes the elaborateness with which her supposed
“friend” has deceived her. Unwanted Guest is very much to the Lifetime formula, but within it Ray managed to
create a work of genuine suspense and moral complexity — only Christine Conradt
among Lifetime’s usual writers matches him in the ability to create
multidimensional characters even within the limits of this set of clichés (and
if she’d written this no doubt she would have called it The Perfect
Guest!) — the sort of entertainment we hope
for from Lifetime and all too often get thrown a much less well digested blend
of their usual clichés instead.

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Last night I watched a NOVA episode called “Invisible Universe Revealed” that
told the entire history of the Hubble space telescope, from its origins as a
NASA proposal in the 1960’s — it was advanced by a woman astronomer named Nancy
Roman, who got a job with NASA after she couldn’t get a tenure-track teaching
job because it was 1959 and she was a woman (it’s amazing that that kind of
shit was still going on in my lifetime!) — and targeted by Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin, who was
first elected in 1957 to fill Joseph McCarthy’s seat after McCarthy died) as
one of the wasteful government projects he thought should be canceled. The
appropriation nonetheless went through in 1977 and the Hubble duly got launched
in 1990 — and promptly became a national laughingstock because its elaborate
array of cameras and mirrors produced only blurry images that were
scientifically useless. It turned out one of the mirrors had been ground about
two micrometers too flat, and a crew of astronauts from the space shuttle had
to install an array of new mirrors that looked like a shower head (and they
were designed by a man who actually got the idea for the corrective mirror from a shower head!). Hubble has been serviced in space
five times in all, though after the last mission in 2009 the space shuttle was
decommissioned so it will eventually fall to earth and vaporize like any other
satellite (though there’s a plan by NASA to brake it in space so at least the
mirrors can be salvaged).

The most interesting aspect of the Hubble was that it
actually did advance our knowledge of the universe, not only that it’s
expanding but the rate of its expansion is actually increasing (earlier astronomers had thought it would slow
down due to the force of gravity), and that every galaxy contains a black hole
at its core that basically provides the gravitational “glue” that holds it
together. The Hubble (named for Edwin Hubble, the 1920’s astronomer who first
realized that there were other galaxies in space — before that all scientists,
including Albert Einstein, had simply assumed our Milky Way galaxy was the only
one) also discovered the mysterious and still not understood force called “dark
energy.” The Hubble’s images are absolutely fascinating aesthetically and also
have proven scientifically important — they’ve given us our first views of the
formation of stars, and incidentally confirmed the modern theories of star
formation that hold (among other things) that all stars have solar systems — planets are an
inevitable result of the way stars are formed — which means that if every star
has planets, the odds that there is life elsewhere in the universe are vastly
increased. The PBS show on the Hubble was first aired in April 2015 and is a
good deal better than the rather tacky DVD on the Hubble I’d seen earlier, 15
Years of Discovery (it’s been 26 years of
discovery so far and, even though the demise of the shuttle program means it
can no longer be serviced in space, it’s still up there, still taking stunning
pictures of star formations, planetary nebulae — which are the detritus of
dying stars — and the Cepheid variable stars and supernovas that proved the
existence of other galaxies and the expansion of the universe in the first
place).

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

I dashed out of the hall to catch the #7 bus to Balboa Park
to meet Charles at the Organ Pavilion for the showing of the film The
General (Buster Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece,
co-directed by him and Clyde Bruckman but with Keaton undoubtedly the auteur as well as the star) with live organ-music
accompaniment by Dennis James. Charles had told me he would sit near the front,
but as things turned out he’d had to camp out in the third section back — and
he’d got a lot of incredulous looks when he told people he was saving the seat
next to him for someone else. Fortunately we were able to find each other — he was standing up in the
crowd and I spotted him (smart man, especially considering our generally dismal
track record for finding each other in public places) — and I joined him about
10 minutes before the event began. Dennis James turned out to be a screaming
queen — once he opened his mouth to introduce his pre-movie concert program
there was no doubt about his sexual orientation! He played a neat little program,
including an undistinguished Sousa-esque march (Charles croaked out, “It’s … ,”
when he finished the piece and I got the joke instantly — Monty
Python’s Flying Circus), an arrangement of
“Chattanooga Choo Choo,” a piece called “Hurry #2” by one W. T. Simon which he
also used throughout his accompaniment for the film (apparently it was a short
piece from one of the books of music sold during the silent-film era with
pieces suitable for various screen situations, and he picked this one because
it was indicated as useful for accompanying chase sequences involving trains)
and F. W. Measham’s march “American Patrol” (which was in effect his second
Glenn Miller cover of the evening, since Miller recorded an arrangement of
“American Patrol” even before he went into the service himself).

By now The General is
pretty much beyond criticism, but seeing it in this context — not only with a
live musical accompaniment but also with a large audience (comedy always works better with an audience to laugh with you — which is why virtually all TV sitcoms feature
recorded laughter, either added later from a laugh track or supplied during
filming by a live studio audience). The print they had was a 16 mm. re-release
by a company called Essex (and, like the current video of Young at
Heart, it was edited to eliminate any
references to the original producer, Joseph M. Schenck, or releasing company,
United Artists) with some nitrate blotches (notably on the famous sequence in
which the Union train collapses into the river after it attempts to cross the
Rock River bridge after Keaton has fired it) and no color tints (the tints are
included on my video and do add
to the movie, even though The General was certainly not as
radically tinted as, say, the 1916 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or the 1925 The Lost World). It was also surprising from the opening credits
that Keaton’s usual cinematographer, Elgin Lessley, wasn’t with him on this one (did he decide to take a pass
on the rough location conditions in Oregon?), though his usual art director,
Fred Gabourie, was (and certainly
the photography by J. Devereaux Jennings and Bert Haines, using a rich,
deep-focus look obviously copied
from Matthew Brady’s famous photos of the Civil War itself, was nothing to
complain about) — and there’s no doubt but that this is one of Keaton’s two
masterpieces (Sherlock, Jr. is
the other one), a mixture of comedy and violence that was at least 40 years
ahead of its time. (When I first saw it in the 1970’s I remember being
particularly struck by the horrifying payoff to Keaton’s running gag of having
his sword blade detach itself from its handle — the blade goes flying through
the air and kills a Union sniper that has been wiping out a Confederate gun
crew — and I thought at the time, “So Bonnie and Clyde was supposed to be so innovative in its combination
of comedy and violence — and here was Buster Keaton doing it 40 years before!”)
With his hair grown out to be historically authentic, Keaton was never more
beautiful physically — and the incredible attention he paid to detail in making
this movie (down to choosing his location in Oregon because it was the only
place he could find a railroad that still ran on the narrow-gauge track used
during the Civil War) and his artful use of a true story as a framework for his
film only add to the entertainment value (something Chaplin, who threw out
almost all the location footage he shot for The Gold Rush, never really learned). And one thing I hadn’t
realized until I finally got to
see The Navigator, Keaton’s film
from two years earlier, was that the great gag in The General in which he attempts to fire a cannon at the Union
train and the cannon works itself out of adjustment and points itself directly
at him was copied almost exactly from the earlier film — with only one key
difference (which made the gag a lot funnier!): instead of a toy cannon, this
time it was a full-sized one! — 8/4/98

•••••

The film shown last night at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion’s
annual silent-film showing was an acknowledged comedy masterpiece, Buster
Keaton’s The General (1926), based on a
real incident of the Civil War in which a Union raider named James J. Andrews
led a unit across Southern lines to hijack a locomotive, The General, and use it to sabotage the tracks and blow up
bridges so the South couldn’t resupply their army that was facing the Union
forces at Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Southerners hijacked a locomotive of
their own, The Texas, and gave
chase, ultimately tracking down and capturing the Union raiders, eight of whom
(including Andrews) were hanged, while the others were taken prisoner and
ultimately freed in a prisoner exchange. The film casts Keaton — with his hair
grown out and probably the handsomest he ever appeared in a movie — as “Johnnie
Gray” (the everyman-of-the-South symbolism of the name is obvious), engineer on
the Western and Atlantic Rail Road, who (as a title explains to us) has two
loves. One is his locomotive, The General, and the other is … at that point we see Johnnie posting a photo of a
woman on the dashboard of his engine. The woman is “Annabelle Lee” (an equally
obvious everywoman-of-the-South
name), played by Marion Mack — whom I’ve previously been unimpressed by but
this time around struck me as one of Keaton’s most effective leading ladies, at
least partly because he (Keaton not only starred in the film, he produced it
and co-directed with Clyde Bruckman) got a performance out of her that’s so
understated I got the impression he wanted her to be a female “great stone
face” version of himself.

That’s a good thing because, even though the writers’
(Keaton, Bruckman, Al Boasberg — later the creator of the stateroom scene in
the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera — and Charles Henry Smith) conception of her character veered from
spunky (at one point she ties wire between two trees lining the track, creating
a trap for the oncoming Union locomotive that’s chasing them) to stupid (when she
throws a stick into the train’s fire, thinking that will actually help, and
Johnnie ridicules her by putting in an even smaller piece of wood) — under
Keaton’s direction she was at least spared the cooing winsomeness that
afflicted all too many silent-comedy heroines. We first see Keaton paying court
to Annabelle Lee on the porch of her home — he elaborately knocks on her door
without realizing that she’s actually on the porch, right behind him, and it’s
an indication of Keaton’s restraint that when he finally realizes this and does
his double-take, he doesn’t bat his eyes and grin at the camera the way Chaplin
would have. Instead he keeps his “great stone face” on and registers his joy
with just a few eye blinks and the little swallowing gesture he did with his
mouth that made him look like a horse that had just been given a lump of sugar.
He’s in the living room of the Lee home when her brother (Frank Barnes)
announces that Fort Sumter has just been fired on, and her father (Charles
Henry Smith) says, “Then the war is on.” The brother announces his immediate intention
to enlist in the Confederate army, and Johnnie is determined to enlist, too —
only the man in charge of the recruitment office decides he’ll be more valuable
to the Southern cause as an engineer than as a soldier in the ranks.
Unfortunately, no one bothers to tell Johnnie this, though later he tries to
enlist again, this time giving his name as “William Brown” and his occupation
as “bartender.” He’s caught, and caught again when he tries to steal the recruitment papers from
someone who was enlisted, so he’s
immediately damned by the Lee family as a traitor to the South and Annabelle
says she won’t speak to him again until he’s in uniform.

Then the film flashes
forward a year and shows us the Union soldiers plotting the raid, and
afterwards they seize The General
while it’s on a normal passenger run and its passengers and crew have stopped
for dinner — only Annabelle had returned to the baggage car to fetch something,
so the Union raiders end up taking her hostage. Johnnie notices while he’s
washing his hands at the train stop that his locomotive is moving away without
him, so he gives chase — first on foot, then in a hand car (which Keaton has
trouble pushing to get it to work) and finally in another locomotive, The
Texas. Johnnie is supposed to be pulling a
train with Southern soldiers, but he accidentally uncouples the car containing
them so he’s going off to chase the Northerners alone. Along the way most of
the gags stem from the Northerners’ attempt to throw debris on the track to
derail him, and his quite daring (in real life: there were quite a few gags for
which Keaton was genuinely risking life and limb — even the seemingly innocuous
scene when he sits on the cross-tie that drives his locomotive and it goes up
and down with him on it could have killed him if the engine had moved
unexpectedly) tactics to clear the tracks so he can pursue. The most famous gag
was when he steals a cannon from a siding, aims it at the Union train — only
Keaton’s foot gets caught on the holder attaching the cannon car and he ends up
with a fully loaded cannon pointed right at him, about to go off. Keaton had
done this gag just two years before with a miniature cannon in his 1924 film The
Navigator, but it’s both grimmer and
funnier with a full-sized one! Johnnie ends up at the Union headquarters at
Chattanooga, where he reunites with Annabelle and frees her from Union
captivity. He also hides under a table where the Union generals (one of whom is
played by Keaton’s father Joe) are plotting to rendezvous their army with a
supply train for a surprise attack on the Confederates at Marietta, Georgia,
and in the second half of the film Johnnie re-steals The General and uses it to race back to the Southern lines and
let them know of the Union plans. Key to the Northern strategy is getting their
supply train over the Red Rock Bridge, and in the film’s most spectacular scene
Johnnie and Annabelle set fire to the bridge just in time for The
Texas, being driven by the Union men who
are chasing them, to collapse as the bridge weakens under their weight. Though
Keaton had his great special-effects man, Fred Gabourie, on this film (he’s
listed as “technical director” since the term “special effects” hadn’t been
coined yet), and Gabourie was such a master of model work that shots he created
for the 1924 silent film The Sea Hawk were reused as stock in Errol Flynn’s star-making vehicle Captain
Blood and the Flynn quasi-remake of The
Sea Hawk itself, Keaton decreed that there
would be no model work and no effects shots.

He took himself and his company to
Oregon because there was the only place he could find a working railroad that
still used the narrow-gauge track used during the Civil War, and he went way over budget on the film — imdb.com lists a total
cost of $750,000 but Donald Moews’ Keaton biography said he spent over a
million on it, the most expensive comedy film made to that time (his producer,
Joseph M. Schenck, had budgeted it for $400,000) — thanks largely to his almost
Stroheim-esque mania for realism. Keaton was shooting at a time when there were
still a few people left who had living memories of the Civil War, and between
that and Keaton’s overall love of trains (he knew how to drive a locomotive and
it was one of his most frequent pastimes; he also had a large collection of model
trains and used one for one of the funniest gags in his short The
Electric House) this was obviously a personal project for him and one on which he
kicked out the jams. Keaton clearly spent a lot of money not only on the trains
but also on all the authentic props, including cannons and rifles as well as
uniforms, and hiring the Oregon National Guard to play the soldiers (on both
sides; he’d have them dressed in Confederate grey and charge, then change into
Union blue and charge over the same ground, then cut the two together to look
like two armies were chasing each other). The locomotive that crashes through
the burning Red Rock Bridge (the fire was real and Keaton and his cast and crew
had to break off shooting briefly to put it out) was real and remained at the
bottom of the Oregon river for nearly two decades until it was salvaged for
scrap metal during World War II. For his pains The General became the first Keaton film that flopped at the box
office — though at least part of that was due to Joseph Schenck’s having just
assumed the presidency of United Artists, which meant that instead of being
released through MGM as Keaton’s previous features had been, this came out as a
United Artists release and therefore it was available to fewer theatres than Keaton’s
MGM releases. Also, the film’s rapid-fire alternation between comedy and
violence probably threw 1926 audiences as well as critics; the New
York Herald-Tribune reviewer wrote, “Some
of the gags are in gruesomely bad taste,” and it’s not hard to figure out which
ones they mean. When I first saw The General in the early 1970’s I remember thinking that the
1967 film Bonnie and Clyde had
been hailed as a ground-breaking masterpiece for its rapid alternations between comedy and violence — and
here Keaton had been doing it four decades earlier! The scene I was
particularly thinking of ­— and I suspect one of the ones that aroused the Herald-Tribune critic’s ire — was one in which the running gag of
Keaton’s sword blade coming off when he tries to draw it has its payoff when
the blade flies through the air and impales and kills a Union sniper who’s been
picking off the Confederate artillerymen.

The General is one of Keaton’s two best films (his audacious
dream fantasy Sherlock, Jr. from
1924 is the other) and an indication, along with Charlie Chaplin’s The
Gold Rush from a year earlier and the Harry
Langdon-Frank Capra film The Strong Man, also a 1926 production, of what heights silent comedy had reached at
the tail end of the silent era. Yes, the pro-Southern orientation of the story
is politically problematic — in the 1950’s Keaton told an interviewer that he had to play a Southerner because the obligatory happy
ending required that he end the film on the winning side, and though the North
won the overall war the South had won the particular battle he was filming — I
noticed Charles quietly applauding whenever the Union forces on screen scored a
victory even though we were “supposed” to be rooting for the boys in grey.
Keaton returned to the Civil War as a subject when he did gags for the 1948 Red
Skelton film A Southern Yankee
(for which he worked out a great scene in which Skelton wears a uniform that’s
blue on one side, grey on the other, and when the blue side faces the Union
troops and the grey side faces the Confederates both sides salute him — only he
turns around, and this time the blue side faces the Confederates, the grey side
faces the Unionists, and both sides shoot at him), and the original story was
filmed by Walt Disney in 1962 as The Great Locomotive Chase (with real-life Southerner Fess Parker playing
Keaton’s role) — but The General
is the film people remember even though it’s not the start-to-finish laugh-fest
many of Keaton’s films (especially his shorts) were. Instead it’s a
character-driven war movie whose laughs come from situations and comic action
scenes that arise naturally from the story — Keaton having realized early on in
his feature-film career that he had to pay a lot more attention to story development and consistency,
and avoid the cartoon-like gags he’d done in his shorts — while the physical
“look” of the film (J. Devereaux Jennings and Bert Haines were his
cinematographers) is absolutely consistent with the photographic record we have
of the Civil War; at times it looks as if the pictures of Matthew Brady and
Alexander Gardner have come to life before our eyes. It’s no surprise that
Keaton and Raymond Rohauer chose The General as the film with which they would re-introduce him
to the public in the late 1950’s; it was a ground-breaking film that, like the
Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, Vertigo and many other films that flopped at their original
release and later became acknowledged classics, needed time to catch up to it.
— 8/23/16

Monday, August 22, 2016

Last night I watched a PBS tribute to the
Kingston Trio which turned out to be a concert special by the Trio’s current
lineup. The original Kingston Trio consisted of Dave Guard, Bob Shane and Nick
Reynolds, though Guard and Shane broke up the band after 10 years of
substantial success (and they launched in San Francisco at the Purple Onion, not in L.A. as the narration of this show had it) and
Guard left, Shane took over ownership of the name, and John Stewart — later a
solo folk artist in his own right (though his one major hit, “Gold,” probably
sold mainly because of Stevie Nicks’ presence on second vocal) replaced Guard. I haven’t been
able to nail down definitively when this show was made — the only Web sources I can find were for a 1982
special, also on PBS, but the Trio had a different lineup then (it was the
Shane-Reynolds-Stewart one) and also the guest stars were different (Mary
Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac, Roger
Gambill, George Grove and Tom Smothers of the Smothers Brothers). Today’s
Kingston Trio consists of Grove, Bill Zorn, Rick Daugherty and Paul Gabrielson
— which of course really makes
them the Kingston Quartet, though unlike their original bass player (who was
front and center with the other two), Gabrielson hides in the back. The guests
this time around were Sana Christian (whom I’d never heard of before but who’s
a quite good country singer, sounding much like Linda Ronstadt when she sang country — and out of all the various forms of
music Ronstadt sang over her career, I always liked her best as a country
singer), Trini Lopez (who joined the Kingstons on “La Bamba), the Limeliters,
Henry Diltz (who these days is best known as a photographer but was a member of
the Modern Folk Quartet, a faux-folk group Phil Spector put together in the early 1960’s and named
after the Modern Jazz Quartet;
their main importance was in launching the career of Harry Nilsson) and Al
Jardine of the Beach Boys.Jardine came in for what could have been one of the
best moments of the program and instead turned out to be one of its worst; the
Kingstons started singing their version of “Sloop John B.” and Jardine came out
and “corrected” them, steering them towards a neither-fish-nor-fowl rendition
that didn’t sound like the Kingston Trio’s version and didn’t sound like the
Beach Boys’ version (though there was a drummer hidden in the wings to give it
a more rock and less folk sound) but was an unhappy amalgam of the two. There were two people on stage with direct connections to the
original group: Josh Reynolds, Nick Reynolds’ son, came out to sing the lead on
“M.T.A.” originally sung by his dad; and Bob Shane himself, who like Artie Shaw
in his later years is usually a non-performer who sends the group out but stays
home and gets his cut from them — they even joked that for years Shane toured to build up the name
of the group, and now he sits home and profits from it — but this time around
came out and joined in on a few of the songs. The reason Shane no longer
participates actively in the group’s performances (except on special occasions
like this) became obvious when he did come out — and it was obvious that there were two pieces of plastic wrapped around his head: his
glasses and his breathing tube. He was carrying a portable canister of oxygen
and breathing through that, though his voice — albeit ragged with the passage
of time — didn’t seem to be affected by whatever medical disorder requires him
to breathe pure oxygen instead of normal air. He sang lead on “Tom Dooley” and
soloed on “Scotch and Soda,” an odd Kingston Trio original because it’s closer
to jazz or lounge music than folk — one could readily imagine it done by Frank
Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan (and though most people don’t know
this, Sinatra actually had one of the biggest hits of his career with a
Kingston Trio cover: “It Was a Very Good Year”). Guard — who in his dotage has
grown his hair long the way Lyndon Johnson did — sang “Scotch and Soda”
beautifully and actually put his worn vocal quality to good use projecting the
tear-in-my-scotch-and-soda lyric. One other guest star was Barry McGuire, who
claimed that he and Mamas and the Papas founder John Phillips co-wrote the
Kingston Trio hit “Greenback Dollar” (though the Wikipedia page on the Kingston
Trio said it was Hoyt Axton — whose career got a weird boost from his mom
having co-written “Heartbreak Hotel,[1]”
which Axton covered on his own first solo album, Hoyt Axton Explodes!, on Vee-Jay), which McGuire performed with them.The Kingston Trio’s music remains folk-lite, sometimes heavier than that (they
had the first hit on Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” which
has a complicated history — it was originally a poem by Russian author Boris
Shtokolov which Seeger set to music; later Marlene Dietrich commissioned a
German translation so she could perform it on her German tours and make her
former countrymen acutely aware of what she thought of her native land’s
militaristic history; and when Joan Baez recorded it she covered Dietrich’s
German version!) — “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” was the climax of the
concert (and the Trio also recorded “Blowin’ in the Wind,” though that seems
more like Capitol wanting a version that would compete with Bob Dylan’s
original on Columbia and Peter, Paul and Mary’s hit on Warner Bros.). Most of
the Kingston Trio’s repertoire on last night’s program was familiar — “Tijuana
Jail,” “Chilly Winds” (with a beautiful vocal countermelody by Christian), the
novelty “Rev. Mr. Black” that interpolates “You Got to Walk That Lonesome
Valley,” “Raspberries, Strawberries and Good Wine,” “Scarlet Ribbons” (weighed
down by Bob Shane, Al Jardine and the Eagles’ Timothy B. Schmidt on guest
vocals — Harry Belafonte’s version remains unsurpassable to me), and “The
Sinking of the ‘Reuben James’.” There was one song I wouldn’t have identified
as Kingston Trio material: the haunting country ballad “Long Black Veil,”
written in 1959 bu Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin — the announcement identified
Wilkin as the first woman ever admitted to the Country Music Hall of Fame
(ahead of Sara and Maybelle Carter or Patsy Montana? That seems unbelievable!)
— and first recorded by Lefty Frizzell (a dramatic departure from his usual
honky-tonk style), though I know it mostly from the versions by Joan Baez (even
though she sang a lyric obviously intended for a man without any changes) and
Johnny Cash (who covered it on his Live at Folsom Prison album — an odd sort of live concept album in
which, instead of just coming in and doing his regular concert set, he
cherry-picked his repertoire and focused on songs about crime and prison). The
Kingstons were hardly in the same league as Cash and Baez — they took the song
too fast and lost the plaintive quality (it’s a song, after all, about a man
who agrees to plead guilty to murder and be executed because he can’t bear to
tell the truth — that he was having sex with his best friend’s wife when the
crime was committed) — but it was still an interesting byway on a quite
pleasant and engaging music program.

[1]— Actually Mae Boren Axton was the sole composer of
“Heartbreak Hotel,” though she put her friend Tommy Durden’s name on the song
as co-writer because he agreed to make the demo record that convinced Elvis
Presley to record it as his first major-label release — and thanks to Col.
Parker’s ironclad insistence on taking cut-in credits on virtually everything Elvis
recorded, Elvis’s name got listed as a “co-writer” as well.

The film I wanted to watch last night was Batman v
Superman: Dawn of Justice (the lower-case
“v” in the title, instead of “vs.” or just “v.” with a period, was supposed to
evoke the nomenclature of court cases — though the court pleadings and opinions
I’ve seen use “v.” with the
period), directed by Zach Snyder from a script by Chris Terrio and David S.
Goyer and a 2 ½-hour long movie (though there’s an “Extended Edition” that’s a
full three hours, which would be too much of an indigestible thing) that, though
it has its moments, for the most part is a lumbering behemoth of a movie that
epitomizes much of what’s gone wrong with the superhero genre in films. I come to a movie like this not having
read either a Superman or Batman comic (except for reissues of the older ones) since
my own teen years in the 1960’s, and I have fond memories of the mythos surrounding both characters and the DC Universe as
they stood then but haven’t
really kept up with later developments except through watching the movies. Batman
v Superman is more or less a sequel to Man
of Steel (2013), which was scripted by
Goyer and Christopher Nolan (who has a vague credit on this one among the usual
laundry list of “producers”) and also directed by Snyder. When Charles and I
watched Man of Steel together I
called it “one of the most disappointing movies either of us had seen in quite
some time!” — and it’s a measure of its unmemorability that last night Charles
couldn’t recall whether or not he’d seen it — though it comes off as at least a
minor masterpiece compared to Batman v Superman. Young(ish) British actor Henry Cavill (a lesser
light in Woody Allen’s masterpiece Whatever Works) returns as Superman, and Batman is played by Ben
Affleck — a weird bit of casting, especially since a decade ago he played, not
a superhero himself, but an actor who’d played one in the marvelous Hollywoodland (an historical fantasy about the last days of actor
George Reeves, who played Superman on the 1950’s TV series and found it
disqualified him from being considered for more substantial roles — he had a
minor part in From Here to Eternity
but was cut out of the film when audience members at preview screenings
recognized him, cried out, “That’s Superman!,” and started laughing) — though
he’s O.K. in a surprisingly small part that, like Nolan’s own Batman films
(especially the last, The Dark Knight Rises), gave him considerably more screen time as Bruce
Wayne than in the Batsuit. (Lewis Wilson and Michael Keaton remain my favorite
big-screen Batmen, and the films they were in — the 1943 Columbia serial
directed by Lambert Hillyer, and the 1989 feature by Tim Burton that
kick-started the modern-day Batman franchise and also featured Jack Nicholson
as the best-ever Joker — remain, at least in my mind, the best Batmovies of
all.)

There are two big problems with Batman v Superman, and they’re worth noting since they afflict a lot of the superhero movies being made today: first is a
“plot,” if you can call it that, which flits from incident to incident and
story to story in a way that’s supposed to be powerfully ambiguous but just
ends up being confusing. The second is the continuing attempt to use the superhero mythologies to tell some great,
enduring “truths” about human nature in general and its penchant for violence,
as well as its desire to worship someone or something greater than ourselves,
in particular. One thing the film does do well is show just how many innocent people get hurt when
superheroes duke it out for control of major urban areas like Superman’s
“Metropolis” and Batman’s “Gotham” (the latter was obviously supposed to be New York City but the former is a bit
more obscure — Superman creators
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster lived in Cleveland when they worked out the
character, so it’s likely that was their model even though it’s not that big a city and the “Metropolis” in the movie is
actually Jersey City, so it could be spotted just across the river from New
York); according to one imdb.com “Trivia” poster Batman kills 30 people during
the course of the film. In the brief original phase of the Bat-legend, creators
Bob Kane and Bill Finger showed him as a vigilante with an ambiguous
relationship to Gotham’s official law enforcement, often murdering criminals
himself instead of turning them over to the authorities, but that version of
the character lasted only three years (1937 to 1940) before they softened him
up, introduced Robin the Boy Wonder (who hasn’t been seen on the big screen
since the last of the four 1980’s-1990’s Batman movies, Batman and
Robin, the one with George Clooney even
more miscast than Affleck as Batman and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze)
and gave him the same aversion to killing in the name of “justice” Siegel and
Shuster had built into the character of Superman. Then in the 1980’s the comics
started getting darker, Robin ceased to appear as a character, and the
so-called “Dark Knight” version of the Batman mythos was created by Alan Moore and Frank Miller.
According to imdb.com contributors far more up on the modern-day evolution of the Batcycle than I will ever
be, good chunks of the plot line of the Dark Knight comics (or “graphic novels,” the term of art for a
comic long enough to be an entire book) found their way into the script for Batman
v Superman.

The film certainly qualifies for
the much-abused term “all-star cast,” since among the dramatis
personae are not only Ben Affleck and Henry
Cavill but Jeremy Irons as Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred (and, curiously, this
time he’s just a butler rather
than a scientific genius in his own right the way Morgan Freeman was in the
Nolan cycle, and he never appears on screen with anyone other than Affleck),
Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Superman’s
adoptive parents Jonathan and Martha Kent, Amy Adams as Lois Lane (she doesn’t
get nearly enough screen time but she’s superbly spunky in the best Noel Neill
tradition), Holly Hunter in a great turn as U.S. Senator Finch (alas, she gets
blown up one-third of the way through the film by a terrorist attack during a
Senate hearing at which Superman has agreed to testify), and the man who really
makes this movie and gives it whatever entertainment value it has, Jesse
Eisenberg as Lex Luthor. At first I was fooled by a bit of dialogue that
referenced Luthor’s father growing up in East Germany and thought that
Eisenberg, playing Luthor as a young high-tech CEO with a full head of hair,
was supposed to be, not the original Luthor, but his son and heir — but it was
clear by the end of the movie that he was the real deal, especially when at the
end of the movie he’s put into an insane asylum and all that lovely hair gets
shaved off by the staff, turning Eisenberg into the bald Luthor we all know and
love to hate from the comics. Eisenberg’s performance here is an odd cross
between Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow in the last stand-alone Batman movie, The
Dark Knight Rises, and a parody of
Eisenberg’s own performance as Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in The
Social Network. Babbling away at a mile a
minute and saying things that seem to contradict themselves even before they’re
quite out of his mouth — at a high-class fundraiser for literacy he’s supposed
to give a speech and comes up with, “Books are knowledge and knowledge is
power, and I am … no. Um, no. What am I? What was I saying? The bittersweet
pain among men is having knowledge with no power because … because that is paradoxical, and, um … thank you for coming” — Luthor as shown
here comes off not as the dour revenge-driven monomaniac he was in the comics
but as Donald Trump on crystal with a cuter (but still pretty anarchic) hairdo.
Eisenberg is the one actor in this movie who really gets to create a character
we can identify with — he may be a bad guy (though in this sort of story the
villains are usually more interesting than the heroes anyway), but he’s also
witty, charming, discombobulated and vain but also oddly self-deprecating (one
thing that definitely differentiates him from Trump!).

He’s a breath of fresh
air in a movie that otherwise seems to be presenting as dour a vision of the
world as its creators could imagine — instead of creating superheroes and
holding them up as visions of what normal people could be and what they should
aspire to be, the modern comic-book writers and the people who film these sorts
of stories keep trying to make their “heroes” as conflicted and darkly driven
as their villains, to bad effect. Indeed Batman v Superman presents such a dark vision of the world one could readily imagine its writers doing
Trump’s speeches — one of the chief criticisms of Trump at (and immediately
after) the Democratic convention was that he’d managed to create such an
apocalyptic picture of America that one was startled to wake up the next
morning and find the sun was still shining and the birds were still singing.
Not much sun shines in Batman v Superman — most of it takes place at night and even the few daylight exteriors
are cloudy — and no birds sing, though in one sequence when Superman rescues
Lois Lane after Luthor pushes her off the top of his “LexCorp” building there’s
just a hint of the sheer joy of the “flying date” Superman and Lois went on in
the first Superman film with
Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder. I wonder if this is a Zeitgeist issue — if Zach Snyder and his writers are
responding to the same dark forces in the American psyche that are fueling the
rise of Trump, who essentially presented himself as Superman at the Republican
convention, telling Americans that they live in a deeply broken country — and,
for that matter, a deeply broken world — and declaring, “I alone can fix it.”
(That’s one reason I liked the Senator Finch character: the script had her
actually wonder if, on balance, a character like Superman is good for the world
— though that plot line gets taken out when she blows up.) Also one annoying
aspect of this movie is that much of it assumes a familiarity with the most
recent graphic-novel incarnations of the characters, to the point where
important beings in the DC Universe like Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and The Flash
(Ezra Miller) get introduced with virtually no clue for the non-cognoscenti as to just who they are.

Even Wonder Woman (Gal
Gadot), who’s given an important role in the ending as a “bio-enhanced” human
who has been alive and young-looking at least since 1918 (there’s a photo of
her ostensibly on the front during World War I) that’s supposed to set her up
for future Justice League of America
movies as well as a stand-alone Wonder Woman film set for next year, is never referred to by that
title (only by her alternate identity as “Diana Pierce”), and while there’s a
hint of romantic (or at least sexual) interest between her and Affleck’s Bruce
Wayne, they don’t make it anywhere near the bedroom. The closest we get to a love scene here is when Clark
Kent shows up at Lois Lane’s apartment while she’s taking a bath — though at
least I give writers Goyer and Terrio credit for acknowledging that Lois knows
Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same instead of asking us to believe
that this otherwise intelligent woman hasn’t figured that out long ago — and
the biggest emotional wrench is a scene copied from the most controversial Superman comic ever, in which the character actually “died.”
There’s a confusing fight to the finish between Batman, Superman (whom Luthor
has got to kill Batman by kidnapping Superman’s adoptive mom Martha Kent and
holding her hostage — though the writers never really explain why Batman wants
to kill Superman, to the point of bringing Luthor’s Kryptonite-equipped weapons
into battle, and they stop fighting each other only when they realize that both
had mothers named Martha, which gives them an emotional connection), and a
monster Luthor created from captured Kryptonian technology. The monster looks
like that ugly creature Sea World’s latest ads have dredged up as the main
attraction to get people to go there, and once he’s created it in a
blood-soaked tank out of the corpse of General Zod, the renegade Kryptonian who
escaped his planet’s destruction and was the principal villain of Man
of Steel, Luthor introduces it to Superman
as “an ancient Kryptonian deformity; blood of my blood, born to destroy you! …
Your doomsday.” It wasn’t until I read the imdb.com “trivia” posts that I
realized that “Doomsday” was supposed to be the creature’s name! The film ends
with a double funeral for Superman and Clark Kent (presumably “Kent’s” coffin
is empty) and a double story in the Gotham City Times, announcing the death of Superman on the front page
and a minor story inside that Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent was killed covering the big fight, and we see Lois
Lane scoop up a handful of dirt and throw it on Superman’s coffin — and then
the coffin begins to move and the dirt agitates and starts coming off the top
of the coffin. Charles was hoping for a post-credits sequence showing more of
just how Superman resurrects himself, but I said, “This is DC, not Marvel.”

Batman
v Superman is that most frustrating sort of
bad movie, the bad movie that could have been good or even great, and its
box-office failure sparked a lot of hand-wringing at Warner Bros. about how and
why Disney has been able practically to mint money off their Marvel franchises while Warners has had poor to
mediocre results with the DC characters. Their conclusion had been that Disney
(reflecting company traditions dating back to when Walt Disney the person was
still alive and running the place himself) keeps a tight rein on the Marvel
films’ directors, suppressing their personal styles to make sure all the Marvel
films mesh with each other, while DC has let individual filmmakers have too
much control over their “takes” on the mythic characters. Ordinarily I like it when studios allow directors to make their films
essentially their own way, but the Warners bean-counters may have a point —
even though when Snyder’s Watchmen
was a huge flop they decided that the problem with it was it was R-rated and
they would never make an R-rated superhero movie again. That wasn’t the problem
with Watchmen (it and Man
of Steel are the only other Snyder films
I’ve seen); one problem was that Snyder is the sort of director who never lets
a minor detail like plot coherence get in the way of creating a striking image
— a bad filmmaking habit that’s only exacerbated when your characters
originated in comic books, which are all about creating striking images. The other problem is that
today’s superhero movies are just too damned serious; while I’m not expecting anyone making a film with
the DC characters today to go whole-hog into the campiness of the 1960’s Batman TV series, it would be nice if they brought an
awareness of the absurdity of the entire concept of the comic-book superhero to
their projects and were able to work that in (as Tim Burton did masterfully in
his two Batman movies) while
still delivering the action goods. There are nice things to say about Batman
v Superman, like the 104 credited stunt
doubles (which indicates that Snyder was staging a lot of the action with real
humans instead of relying on CGI for everything), but overall it’s just another
draggy superhero movie that’s too long and too self-important for its own good.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

I watched three documentaries PBS put on their schedule on
Tuesday, August 3 as part of the lead-in to the Olympic Games in Rio de
Janeiro, which begin this Friday with the big opening ceremonies. First up was The
Nazi Games: Berlin 1936, a co-production of
something called “taglicht media” with “pre TV” and the Austrian TV networks
ORF and ZDF — which explains why so many of the interviews included were in
German (with voiceover translations), though the interviewees themselves were
cosmopolitan enough they probably knew enough English to be interviewed in it.
The basic thesis of the program was that it was the 1936 Berlin Olympics which
set the template for every modern Olympic Games since: the construction of
monumental stadia and other venues for the Games to take place in (one
commentator said the International Olympic Committee expects host cities to
build permanent structures, not
merely temporary facilities, whether or not the cities can afford them or will
have any use for them once the Games are over), the elaborate pageantry — it
was apparently the organizers of the Nazi Games that first thought of the idea
of having an Olympic torch start out in Greece and be carried by relay runners
to the site of the current Games, which has been done in every Olympics ever
since — and the whole exploitation of the Olympics for political propagandist
purposes. One thing I hadn’t known before watching this was that the winning
bid for Berlin as the host city of the 1936 Olympics had been made as far back
as 1930 — well before the Nazis gained power — and indeed the two heads of the
German committee that wrote and presented the bid to the IOC were both Jewish
(and, to forestall one of the many threatened boycotts of the Games, the Nazis
were forced to leave them in place as part of the organizing committee until
the Games were over). When Hitler took power his first instinct was to cancel
the Olympics and tell the IOC to have them somewhere else — Hitler was
suspicious of anything
international and his only interest in sports was as a way to give young German
men physical training that could later be used to make them soldiers for the
war he intended to start as soon as he’d rebuilt enough of the German military
to make it realistic.

But he (likely advised in this direction by his Minister
of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels) quickly realized that the Olympics provided him
a heaven-sent propaganda opportunity to present Nazi Germany to the world as he
wanted the world to see it, peace-loving and tolerant. He issued decrees that
there would be no racial or religious persecution of foreign athletes coming to
Berlin for the Games (and there wasn’t), and that Jews would have an equal
chance to compete for spots on the German team (which they didn’t; he
grudgingly let on one Jewish
athlete, a woman diver who was blonde, blue-eyed and didn’t look particularly
“Jewish”). In the filmmakers’ presentation, the real villain is Avery Brundage,
a well-heeled American and postwar head of the IOC, who saw his chance to gain
power in the Olympic movement by fiercely defending the Berlin Olympics against
threats of boycotts; a number of Jewish organizations and non-Jewish allies
tried to organize boycotts, and at one point got the U.S. Amateur Athletics
Union (AAU) within a hair’s-breath of withdrawing its sanction for the Games.
Brundage worked his way around that by saying that the U.S. Olympic Committee,
which he headed, would sanction the athletes itself if the AAU refused to, but
that wasn’t necessary; he got the vote he wanted from the AAU and the U.S. team
went to Berlin — as did those of 46 other nations, the largest representation
of any modern Olympics to that time. The film discusses not only the boycott
threats (including the sad fate of three Austrian swimmers who decided on their
own not to participate — and who got hammered by the Austrian authorities even
while the country was still nominally independent: the Austrian athletic guilds
imposed a lifetime ban on them so
they could never swim in competition) but also the hazards of the breakneck
construction pace Hitler insisted on to make sure every facility would be ready
for the start of the Games, including the collapse of a tunnel near the
Brandenburg Gate (because it was built too close to the surface), which killed
four workers — who were declared Heroes of the State and given what amounted to
a military funeral, with their swastika flag-draped coffins on display before
thousands of people.

The Games themselves went pretty much the way Hitler
wanted them to — he wanted Germany to win the most medals to show the racial
superiority of his “Aryan” people — and while the United States led the medal
count early due to their dominance in track and field (including the fabled
feats of Black American sprinter Jesse Owens — who got a lot of footage in Leni Riefenstahl’s great documentary
of the Games, Olympia, mainly
because for all her support of the Nazis she wasn’t particularly interested in
their racial B.S. and she was fascinated by Black male bodies, as she proved
after the war when, blacklisted from the German film industry, she started
making anthropological trips to Africa and shooting highly sexualized photos of
the native men), the Germans caught up and eventually surpassed the U.S. when
the events they were especially good at — the ones with military applications,
like horse riding, fencing and rowing — came up later in the Games. The makers
of The Nazi Games (whose names I
couldn’t find online — PBS used to offer quite a lot of printed documentation
on their shows but now their Web presence seems directed almost exclusively to
“streaming” versions of the shows themselves) obviously borrowed a lot of Riefenstahl’s Olympia footage, including the famous shot of the dirigible Hindenburg (a year before its fabled destruction in an accident
at Lakehurst, New Jersey) looming over the Olympic stadium as Hitler and others
in the Nazi bigwigs’ box waited for the Games to begin. Most of the rest was
probably from the Deutsche Woschenschau, the “German Weekly Newsreel,” the official Nazi production which was
considerably more creatively photographed and edited than its U.S. equivalents.

The filmmakers also cut in footage from more recent Olympics to show how the
pageantry and spectacle invented by the Nazis for their Games have been
reproduced again and again, and indeed expanded on by later Games organizers —
and they also make the point that the IOC has generally not only been willing
to deal with authoritarian governments but has preferred to because a dictatorship is more likely than a
republic to be able to build the giant structures the IOC demands and displace
as many people out of the way as needed, both to make room for the stadia,
Olympic villages, training facilities and whatnot and to get “undesirable”
people off the streets for the duration of the event. When the narration
mentions how the Nazis swept the streets of Berlin of over 600 “Roma” and
“Sinti” (i.e., Gypsy) people and put them in concentration camps (later the
Gypsies would be among the principal populations singled out for elimination in
the Holocaust, along with Jews, Communists, Queers and people with
disabilities), I couldn’t help but make the parallel with the recent actions of
the city government of San Diego to sweep the downtown streets clear of
homeless people — including planting so-called “rock gardens” under overpasses
where homeless people had been sleeping and threatening to arrest anyone who
ran food lines for them — for the same reason the Nazis did it in Berlin in
1936: so out-of-town visitors wouldn’t see any “undesirable” people clogging up
the streets when they came to watch the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in
Petco Park. Oddly, the narration in the actual documentary didn’t use the term
“Potemkin village” to describe how the Nazis cleaned up their act and made
Berlin look clean, spanking new and like a mecca of peace and tolerance for the
foreign visitors to the Games (which were also the first ones broadcast to the
U.S. “live” — unlike the organizers of the Los Angeles Games in 1932 they did not charge foreign stations rights fees — and also the
first ones ever televised, though the only way you could watch the games on TV
was in exclusive “TV cottages” which at one point were more crowded and harder
to get tickets to than the actual live venues where the games were being
played), though the Web site on the program did.

It also oddly did not mention
that the 1936 Winter Olympics
were also held in Germany (in the Northern German resort town of
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Richard Strauss owned a villa that he had told
Kaiser Wilhelm had been paid for from the royalties from his controversial
opera Salomé), or that 20th
Century-Fox used both the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympics as backdrops for
movies (the Winter Games for One in a Million, screen debut of Sonja Henie, who won gold medals
for figure skating in the 1928, 1932 and 1936 Games; and the Summer Olympics for Charlie Chan at the
Olympics, which featured Keye Luke in his
usual role as Number One Son of Charlie Chan but also made him a member of the
U.S. swim team — and the young Keye Luke looked quite hot in a bathing suit and
nothing else), though it did
mention that largely due to Brundage’s maneuvering (Brundage got onto the
International Olympic Committee at long last when one of the German Jews who had
originally proposed Berlin as the site of the 1936 Games was pushed out by
Hitler after the Games were over and he felt he could show his true face
again), the 1940 Winter Olympics were moved from Japan (which was already at
war with China in the 1930’s, well before the rest of World War II began) to
Germany — though in the event they weren’t held because of the war and the
Olympics didn’t resume until 1948. The show also made clear that Brundage
wasn’t just a Nazi fellow-traveler; he agreed with a lot of their ideology and
in particular their anti-Semitism (though there’s no evidence he actually
wanted to see them all killed; remember that anti-Jewish prejudices were quite
common among the U.S. and European upper classes until the revelation of the Holocaust
after the war made anti-Semitism look sick and decidedly unfashionable), and
every time anyone spoke out against the Berlin Olympics and called for a
boycott, Brundage smeared them as tools of the Communists and the Jews.
Brundage eventually became head of the entire Olympic movement until he fell
from power in 1968, another year of political and social ferment that affected
the Games big-time.

Yesterday I watched three PBS specials about the Olympics —
all telling historical stories about Olympics past and obviously programmed now
to take advantage of the upcoming Olympics present: The Nazi Games: Berlin
1936 (described above), The Boys
of ’36 and a vest-pocket half-hour
documentary from a local PBS station in Sacramento, Arnold Knows Me:
The Tommy Kono Story. It seemed odd that
after The Nazi Games PBS would
show an episode of American Experience portraying the Berlin Olympics as the goal in a quite commonplace
up-from-nowhere inspirational sports story, but that’s what they did, focusing
on the University of Washington and the unlikely eight-man rowing crew they put
together in the mid-1930’s, mostly from the sons of loggers and industrial
workers who were literally working their way through college and were looked
down upon by the kids of the 1-percenters at the big Eastern universities that
had dominated American participation in the sport. The Boys of ’36 was a true story, but as Charles once said to me
about the film Shine, it’s a true
story they made a movie about because it fits so neatly into the clichés of
fiction film. Among the characters in the story were Joe Rantz, a logger’s son
from Spokane (also the home town of Bing Crosby) who was literally abandoned by his family and forced to live on his
own in the wild, feeding himself by shooting game and doing odd jobs for what
little spending money he had. (He was essentially a real-life male version of
Cinderella; his mom died when he was little and the woman his dad married after
that hated him and favored her own kids by her previous husband.) Also there was Don Hume, the
crew’s “stroke” — the lead rower who sets the pace for the others — who was key
to their come-from-behind victories but was laid up with a high fever in
Berlin; the team’s imperious coach, Al Ulbrickson, was about to replace him for
the big race but the other crew members refused to row without him; and Bobby Moch
(pronounced “Mock”), the coxswain (the little guy at the end of the boat with a
megaphone calling out to the others to stroke), who had come from one of the
other University of Washington teams and had made fun of the more déclassé rowers until he was assigned to their boat. There
are a few wrinkles in the story that weren’t mentioned on the show, like the
way the Washington boys were nearly aced out of the Olympics because they
couldn’t raise the money to get there; according to an online article by Michael
Socolow I read about the team at http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/fivering_circus/2012/07/_1936_olympics_rowing_the_greatest_underdog_nazi_defeating_american_olympic_victory_you_ve_never_heard_of_.html
:

Immediately
following the Huskies’ victory in the Olympic trials, the team was informed by
the U.S. Olympic Committee that it needed to come up with $5,000 to pay its way
to Berlin. Seeing an opening, Henry Penn Burke—chairman of the Olympic Rowing
Committee and a University of Pennsylvania alum—offered to send his beloved
Quakers in place of the Huskies. The sports editors of Seattle’s top two
newspapers, outraged on behalf of the local heroes, enlisted newsboys to
solicit donations while hawking papers. With American Legion posts and Chambers
of Commerce throughout the state chipping in, enough money was collected in
three days to send the team to Berlin. As a consequence of the funding drive, remembered Gordon Adam, who rowed in the
three-seat, “people in the city felt that they were stockholders in the
operation.”

The team members, most of whom had never been out of
Washington state until they started rowing in U.S. competitions (including the
Olympics trials meet in Poughkeepsie, New York — during which they decided to
use their free day to see if they could crash the home of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt and see him — and in these days of hyper-security it’s amazing that
they not only got onto the grounds of FDR’s home but knocked on his front door;
the President wasn’t there but one of his sons answered and they spent hours
with the younger Roosevelt, who bonded with them because he was a rower
himself), ended up in Berlin and their race was the last on the day’s program.
All the previous rowing events had been swept by the Germans, who (like the
Soviets after World War II) were “amateurs” only in name; they were
professionally trained and, though they ostensibly had private-sector jobs or
were in the German military, they were essentially work-furloughed to train for
and participate in the Olympics. The U.S. and British crews were “mysteriously”
assigned the worst positions on the lake — on the outside lanes with the most
interference from the wind — even though they had turned in the best qualifying
times. Nonetheless, using the same come-from-behind strategy they had perfected
in their U.S. victories — they would pace themselves, hang back in the earlier
part of the race and then go full-bore to the finish, passing the other boats
they’d let slip past them earlier (which itself puts them squarely in the
standard template used by Hollywood in sports stories, on the ground that a
come-from-behind victory is always more dramatically moving and exciting than
one in which the team we’re supposed to be rooting for gets out in front early
and stays there) — the U.S. won the eight-man crew event and scored a triumph
sportscaster Grantland Rice called the “high spot” of the U.S. participation in
the Berlin Games.

After that KPBS showed a half-hour documentary on Tommy
Kono, a Japanese-American weightlifter who discovered the sport when he was
interned at the Tule Lake camp in 1942 in that hysterical over-reaction the
U.S. government engaged in, basically declaring virtually all
Japanese-Americans in Hawai’i and the West Coast enemy aliens, driving them
from their homes, forcing them to sell all their belongings (including, in some
cases, thriving businesses) at fire-sale prices and moving them to camps in
out-of-the-way locales Edward G. Robinson, by way of explaining why all the Japanese
villains in U.S. World War II movies were played by Chinese actors, called
“America’s version of Dachau” (and Robinson, a Romanian Jew who no doubt would
have been a Holocaust victim if he’d stayed in his native land, was not the
sort of person to make Nazi comparisons lightly). As hellacious as the
internment was, it ironically had a good effect on Kono; before the internment
his family had lived in Hawai’i and then in Sacramento, California, and Kono
had had a chronic case of asthma which went away in the superior climate of
Tule Lake. He started developing an interest in athletics in the camp, playing
not only baseball but basketball as well (even though his short, wiry frame was
not the stuff of which basketball players are usually made), and when the Kono
family were finally released in November 1945 — two months after the Japanese surrender formally ended World War II —
he focused on weight-lifting as his chosen sport. He bought a set of weights
from a friend who was replacing his old set with a new one, and turned the Kono
family garage into a workout room. War interfered with his life again in 1950,
when he was drafted by the U.S. army and was about to be sent to Korea as a
cook when someone in the army noticed his weight-lifting potential and essentially
furloughed him so he could train for the 1952 Olympics, where he won gold in
the welterweight class. He moved up to a heavier weight class and won in 1956,
and he also entered bodybuilding contests and won Mr. World once and Mr.
Universe three times. In 1959 he participated in an exhibition in Vienna,
Austria and a boy named Arnold Schwarzenegger was in the audience and was so
impressed he decided to make bodybuilding his career. Hence the title of the
documentary; years later, when Schwarzenegger was governor of California and
Kono was living in retirement in Sacramento, Kono was often asked if he knew
Schwarzenegger — and he would reply, “No. Arnold knows me.” The photos of Kono (both footage of his remarkable
achievements and stills) make it not only amazing that someone so slightly
framed (women are sometimes referred to as having “hourglass figures” but Kono
is one of the few men who had one) could become so accomplished a bodybuilder
he could lift four times his own weight regularly, they also take us back to a
day when someone could win Mr. Universe and still look credible as a male human
being (and a quite attractive one, too) instead of becoming so muscular they ended up looking like a relief map of
a mountain range.